Kill Me Now Or Pay Me Later

It turned out Stevenson had personally brought round the summons for my court appearance to be done for blasphemous vandalism.

Inside, Kimba sat at the kitchen table glugging rotten Maxwell instant.
- Vandalism and breach of the peace, - I said reading the summons out loud.
- What’d he bring it right round here for? – said Kimba, trembling.
- I don’t know, - I said. – I don’t think he’s right in the head. You’ll not be right in the head if you keep drinking coffee like that and shaking. You’ll shake your skeleton out your hole.
Kimba laughed her coffee out her nose then boked on the floor.
- Clean up, - I said, handing her the mop.

Put off my toast and Satsuma by Kimba’s bad manners I skipped breakfast and decided to go see my mum instead.

My mum is not long out of a psych ward after her doctor, a Dr Styrm, mistakenly believed she’d tried to cut her own throat, while in actual fact (as everyone from me down to my Down’s Syndrome cousin Donatello will tell you) she cut herself by accident while shaving.

It turned out, as she told me over a hot whiskey, that she enjoyed the pace of the place so much that she acted the eejit in order to stay in a little longer. I realised then she’d been there for 2 months when she was initially only meant to stay for two weeks.
- And not one visit from you or Micheesha! – she scolded.
- I’ve had other things on my mind. I don’t know about Micheesha.
- I can’t rely on my family any more. Just as well then I made some new friends in the hospital. One nice man, named Maurice, explained to me all about the ‘end days’ and that the age of the Anti-Christ is nearly upon us. He told me that the United Nations are going to act as a platform for this Anti-Christ...and he told me to listen to this song to help me understand it all a bit better.
She took from her pinny then a cassette with the words “AXIS ’67 PART 1 – BOBBY CONN” scribbled on the label and put it in her crappy old 80’s stereo.

Out of politeness I tapped the table and nodded my head in time to the number, all while keeping a close eye on her. The notion occurred to me that she had not been acting the eejit on the psych ward but was, in the opinion of the doctors, someone not ‘ready for the outside world yet’, something I’d long suspected.

Somewhere after the two minute mark of the song when it gets heavier she got up and started dancing around, - throwing her hands up in the air and leaping about like a mentally challenged Southern Baptist minister trying to do a star jump during one of his raucous epiphanies.

On hearing the hubbub cousin Donatello ran in then and give me one of his ‘strong hugs’ that I’d warned him about before. Then the two of them joined hands in the middle of the floor and went round and round in circles chanting over and over: Pretty Vacant, The Way Of The Lord’, but I’m not too sure that’s the way the words went though...